Combined portal records in calculation field? Advice needed ...

[meerestier]

Hello,

it will take some lines to decribe, what my problem is, please stay ...

1. Situation:

- I have a very complex database with join tables etc.

- I connect Filemaker to an Indesign Plugin (Easycatalog) over ODBC.

- I can access individual tables, but I have to recreate the relationships in Indesign to access all the information from all tables.

2. What I want:

- I want to manage the complexity in Filemaker.

3. Problem:

- I can display related records in a portal, but cannot access it over ODBC (only individual tables, or very comlex SQL operations with JOIN)

- I want to combine related records in a calculation field, so I can access only this field in Indesign.

4. Question:

- Is this possible in Filemaker calculation fields?

- Is there another path that I missed out on?

See the attached screenshot for more info on the relatinships in filemaker.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Cheers

Lars

[comment]

I want to combine related records in a calculation field

You could use the List() function to aggregate child values into a return-separated list at the parent record (note that empty fields will be skipped). However, that won't be very useful if the child is a join table to another parent. You could concatenate both parent values at the child record and access that - but it seems like an unnecessary duplication of what you can do with a SQL query.